Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.

If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.

Updated the “multi layer support” branch of Curtin after the review from Chad Smith

Updated livecd-rootfs to unbreak customization scripts that used a side effect of previous implementation to change the brand and model assertions by re-preparing the assertions and overwriting the initial ones.

Most apps have dropped the iconic GNOME 3 app menu and moved the menu items into the app with a ☰ menu. The indicator on the left top bar is still present for this release but will now include the Desktop Actions. Altogether, I think this significantly improves usability of the app menus.

Several apps have updated their App IDs to the reverse-domain style (org.gnome.App), affecting the filenames used for their .desktop and app icons. This mostly affects third-party icon themes.

The Terminal app now uses a headerbar by default (technically, upstream doesn’t turn it on by default but I expect most distros will).

GNOME Builder can edit UI files using libglade.

gtk 3.24.5 features updated Adwaita and High Contrast themes. (I uploaded this to Debian Buster.)

Rewrote several Debian/Ubuntu patches to apply against the new versions.

Reported several bugs to GNOME about a variety of issues I discovered with the new releases. Provided merge requests for several of the issues.

Reported a GTK3 regression caught by our build tests which was quickly fixed. GTK3 doesn’t use CI although GTK4 does. I looked into enabling this but there are a few issues (we carry 3 patches to get the build tests working. The 2 recent ATK patches aren’t needed when GTK is built in a full desktop session so I guess we need to figure out how to start some accessibility service in the test environment.)

Completed Evolution 3.31.90 transition

Completed gtksourceview3 → 4 in Ubuntu main mini-transition

Fixed gnome-control-center’s 99_add_lock-on-suspend patch so that it actually works. LP: #938076 has background on why we have this patch. Maybe we could backport this to 18.04 LTS? (It adds a Lock Screen on Suspend switch to Settings > Privacy > Screen Lock.)

Blocked Updates

Totem 3.31.90 drops the Zeitgeist plugin. Can we drop it too?

gnome-desktop3 introduced a new build test that fails for us (it’s checking Hebrew translation of the clock)

I filed a MIR for gsound which is needed for gnome-control-center to migrate out of disco-proposed.

GNOME Builder needs the new glib to migrate out of -proposed.

GNOME Online Accounts could use a .svg version of the Ubuntu One icon. Could someone else handle this update?

Uploaded gnome-control-center with the distro-logo patch we share with Fedora. This adds a nice distro logo to the About page. The Debian implementation uses Debian alternatives (provided in Debian’s desktop-base package) to allow distros to easily substitute their logo without needing to fork key packages like gnome-control-center.
Ubuntu should implement support for this, but it will take some time to collect the logos and prepare the packaging.

Persuaded the Glade maintainer to accept our YAML file and enabled auto-builds to the candidate channel from glade’s stable branch and to the edge channel from glade’s master branch. TODO: fix the version number so that the Snap Store accepts these builds (the CVS style version tags don’t work with snap’s automatic version handler).

Spent time with Ken fighting Launchpad on importing gedit’s git repo. Launchpad is putting up a hard fight.

Other Ubuntu work

Discovered that meson introduced a breaking change that broke our translation handling so I did a pkgbinarymangler upload to adapt

Did several uploads to help us demote policykit-1-gnome and notification-daemon to universe since we no longer use them in the default install. Filed a screen-resolution-extra bug for a blocker issue.

Sponsored several uploads for Khurshid to adapt to the gnome-settings-daemon-schemas package rename

Updated the “multi layer support” branch of Curtin after the review from Chad Smith

Updated livecd-rootfs to unbreak customization scripts that used a side effect of previous implementation to change the brand and model assertions by re-preparing the assertions and overwriting the initial ones.

Experimented with zfs on root partition on Desktop and via curtin.

Read more doc on zfs.

Minor updates to Curtin’s MP2

Misc:

Reviewed some branches from Carlos for gogtk3, and did a lot of refactoring. Experimenting GTK UI state in Go (still WIP)

updated dev to 73.0.3683.20, now using the recently backported clang 7 for bionic builds

updating beta to 73.0.3683.27

libreoffice

preparing 6.2.0 packages for disco − bumped into various build failures always happening towards the end of the build and not always reproducible locally, making it a slow process, but I’m getting there

snaps

debugging gnome-3-28-1804-sdk build failures

rls-bb-tracking bugs

bug #1754671 in network-manager: still in bionic-proposed, no update since last week

I gave up on trying to get the spread tests running with xdg-desktop-portal installed unconditionally. There were too many tests where having it installed caused state to leak between test cases (mainly due to stale document portal mounts).

I’ve compromised so that the Python support packages are installed unconditionally, but xdg-desktop-portal itself is installed/uninstalled for the tests that require it (where I’m also careful to properly clean up relevant state).

snapd dbus activiation:

There was a request about maybe splitting the PR, but I’m not sure how easily that can be achieved: the PR is large because it adds a lot of tests rather than due to the main code changes. There are a few smaller trivial things that could be split, but they don’t make much of a dent to the overall size of the diff.

There has also been discussion on the Snapcraft forum about what syntax daemon: dbus services should use to indicate what bus name indicates they’ve started. I don’t think it should block the PR, but realistically this will probably need to be resolved at next week’s sprint.

snapd polkit interface:

I got feedback this week on the polkit interface proposal forum thread I created. There was a suggestion about having snapd generate polkit .policy files based on interface declarations, but I don’t think that is desirable or workable (especially when policy files contain user facing translated strings).

There is still the open question of what polkit action IDs a snap package should be allowed to export. I’m starting to think snaps should be able to reserve a reverse DNS prefix for use with polkit action IDs, D-Bus names, desktop files, etc, and have snapd prevent conflicting snaps from being installed. That leaves open the question of how to manage who gets to own what though.